You know you need to back up your iPhone, iPad or iPod, right? And you do it regularly, don’t you?

Be honest; most people don’t often back up their devices. If you sync your iOS device to your Mac, you probably do back it up regularly. But if not, if you’re one of those people who just “forgets” to back up your device, you may lose data.

But there’s another problem: do you back up your Mac? All the media in your iTunes library that is on your Mac, that you sync to your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, could disappear if you have a problem with your Mac. If its hard drive dies, and you don’t have a backup, then you won’t have an easy way to access your media.

When you connect your iOS device to your Mac, you can copy purchased content from that device to the Mac, but not the rest. So if you have a hardware problem on your computer, and don’t have a backup, you can have an iOS device full of media that you cannot easily get back on your Mac.

There are a number of apps that can copy media from iOS devices to Macs. Thanks to an article by Josh centers in TidBITS, I discovered one today that I’d never heard of: DeTune. The advantage of this app is that it is free.

DeTune doesn’t restore your media directly to iTunes, but lets you copy it to a folder in the Finder. Select the items you want to copy; if you’ve lost everything on your Mac, you’ll simply want to select all of your media, but in some cases you may have only lost an album or a movie. Create a new folder in the Finder, and drag the selected items to that folder. Wait for DeTune to copy your media — this may take a while if you are copying a lot — and when you’re finished, you’ll find all of your content sorted into folders labeled with the name of the artist and albums, for music, and other labels for other types of content. (Assuming you’ve tagged the music correctly.) This makes it very easy to sort through all of the content and find what you’re looking for.

DeTune is easy to use, and, especially, it is free. Download a copy now to keep on your Mac in case you need it.